As a child, BBC TV’s Blue Peterwas one of the programmes that I was permitted to watch each week and that I couldn’t bear to miss. It was the early seventies and presenters John Noakesand Valerie Singleton – and of course dog, Shep – were my idols. So yesterday it was with great sadness that I learnt of Noakes’s disappearance near his home in the village of S’Arraco in southwest Majorca, the island that he and I have, respectively, chosen to make our home.

After a major emergency search missing John Noakes was found safe in Majorca

By chance I happened to be at sea when the news reached me and with none other than Majorca resident and former British film director and TV producer, Gabrielle Beaumont, ironically a director of Blue Peterduring John Noakes’s time on the show. She was shocked to hear that he was missing and reminisced about her happy time working with him during her tenure at the BBC.… Read more

Those British expats who love nothing more than to curl up on a winter’s night in front of the television tuning into their favourite BBC and ITVsoaps, were dealt a blow recently when both broadcasters migrated to a new satellite which improved reception for UK householders but caused severe problems for those viewing from overseas. Many British expats in the north and northeast of Majorca were unable to receive channels while others living on the mainland and in other parts of Europe including Italy, France and Cyprus experienced a virtual blackout.

Why watch TV abroad when there’s so much more to do?

Of course news of the disruption to television viewing in Majorca reached me just about a day before the changes took place and I can’t say that it caused me great alarm. Whenever I have the luxury of a few hours away from my desk at the weekend I tend to use… Read more

It was Halloween, the last night of the season in Magaluf and hordes of resort workers in celebratory mood and wearing ghoulish costumes filled the bars and clubs in the infamous town. It should have been a fun and carefree night for those who’d worked a long and arduous season but instead the night ended in tragedy.

Tragedy strikes again in Majorca’s bad boy resort Magaluf

In the midst of the festivities a massive street fight broke out on the notorious bar strip known as Calle Punta Ballena during which six Britons were stabbedand rushed to various island hopsitals. As grand finales go, Magaluf’s was certainly memorable if not for the right reasons.

While British newspapers screamed out horror headlines about the incident, locals, expats, and the regional authorities here were left scratching their heads. What should be done about this bad boy Borstal of a resort… Read more

Majorca is suffering from a colossal hangover following the sensationalistic documentary, The Truth about Magalufshown on BBC television earlier this week. Exposing the tawdry underbelly of the island’s most notorious ‘bad boy’ resort has seemingly upset the sensibilities of local officials and sent shivers down the spine of the British expat community living in Majorca. Manu Onieva, the local mayor, has already registered his displeasure with the makers of the documentary at what he and Calvia council described as a ‘stitch up’.

Life’s one big party in Magaluf

The island’s local British newspaper, the Majorca Daily Bulletin, has been inundated with letters from outraged readers dismayed by the content of the documentary presented by Stacey Dooley which lifts the lid on the excessive drinking, drug-taking and sexual antics of the resort. Sorry to be a party pooper, but what did they honestly expect?

There’s a very good reason why Magaluf has been awarded the sobriquet ‘Shagaluf’ over the years. It’s a wild party resort just likeinfamous Salou on the Spanish mainland, targeting the British ‘yoof’ market and offering ludicrously cheap booze and practically 24/7 entertainment of the most dubious kind. It’s a Jekyll and Hyde resort, benign and harmless enough by day and by all accounts a seething den of iniquity by night with few boundaries or concerns for common decency and where, according to one cynical police officer interviewed on the TV programme, ‘every day is the weekend.’

Aside from holidaymakers’ uncontrolled imbibing, drug taking, sexual antics and frequent drunken brawls, Magaluf appears to have far more serious problems on its plate. According to a local ambulance team interviewed, last summer there were 40 cases of ‘balconing’, the term used to describe drunken youths who attempt to climb from one hotel balcony to another. It was claimed that twelve youths had died as a consequence. Rape in the resort has also apparently escalated with 15 to 20 girls apparently making distressed calls to the ambulance service last summer alone. Just this week a young British woman testified against a man who allegedly raped and stabbed her in the resort in 2008. And if that’s not bad enough, there’s been a rise in the number of prostitute gangs and those masquerading as prostitutes who rob inebriated men returning to their hotels late at night.

In the BBC documentary we accompany young presenter Stacey Dooley, Bambi-like in her wide-eyed innocence, on a trip with a local harassed ambulance crew, patrolling police officers, and to a bar where she serves up noxious, alcoholic beverages to intoxicated youths. Squirming with embarrassment she watches an explicit sexual game being played out in the bar and later attempts to take the Spanish owner and promoters to task. They remain unrepentant, placing the blame squarely on the shoulders of British holidaymakers unable to hold their drink. Tellingly – although not investigated by the programme – one Spanish bar owner accused the all-inclusive hotels of putting local businesses under pressure to compete.

It’s easy to blame British youths for lacking any sense of personal responsibility or propriety but fingers must surely also be pointed at the resort itself and its many operatives who seemingly manipulate and exploit the weak-minded and easily misled? Starved of sun and cheap booze back in the UK, for many teenage first time holidaymakers, Magaluf is a disaster waiting to happen.

There are though attractions that keep a responsible eye on their ‘wards’. Mallorca Rocks, arguably the hippest music venue now in Europe, maintains tight security and yet manages to create a relaxed and fun atmosphere. I have ventured from the hills to accompany groups of teenagers to the venue and have never witnessed anything but young people dancing and having a good time. Staff members are courteous, drinks must be purchased-no all inclusive deals here- and everyone must leave on the dot of midnight.

While the storm rages about the BBC documentary, ITV is also homing in on the resort with the launch of a new six-part documentary series. Still, mayor Manu Onieva should cheer up because as far as the modern day Sodom and Gomorrah resorts go, all publicity is good publicity. No doubt thousands more young Britons will flock to Magaluf –as opposed to say Malia in Crete or Salou in Catalonia-thanks to these seemingly perennial, titillating TV extravaganzas and the money will keep rolling in.

In times of economic gloom, the likes of Magaluf, warts and all, are a welcome cash cow for a debt-ridden nation.

“Can I have a word Chris, I want to set up a website for my business.”

“Sure, no problem.” I say ( “Here we go again,” I think). “What type of website have you got in mind?”

“A normal one,” comes back the reply.

Fighting off the urge to run I gallantly venture on: “Er, and what exactly would one of those be?”

“You know, a website that tells people what we do.”

Unfortunately it isn’t as easy as that these days as there are now a variety of basic types of websites on the internet.

Possibly the most popular these days is the blog, really called a weblog; they are in effect an online journal made up of posts relating to events and experiences. It tends to be individuals that run them, but more and more commercial organisations are using them either as an addition to their existing website, or increasingly frequently as their main web presence. If you will excuse the self promotion my own Almerimar Life Blog is a good example of a modern blog.

A commercial website exists in general to sell you a product or service and have become very popular with travel related companies in particular. So anybody wanting to search for Florida holidaysfor example would find a website dedicated to promoting holidays in Florida providing a range of information, holiday deals, and options so that you can shop and compare prices in one place.

News websites have really grown in popularity in recent years, and now include video and audio as well as textual information. The BBChas always had a well deserved reputation as a leader in these types of websites, and the newspapers have also got in on the act in the last couple of years.

Another area that has seen a lot of growth in recent years is the Organisational website which, as you would expect from the name, represents a single organisation, providing information and a means of contacting and integrating with them. An area that springs to mind which uses this type of website and has grown significantly recently would be the Injury claims websites, which are designed to encourage you to deal with that particular organisation only.

With the growth of social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter and the explosion in online entertainment, another popular type of site nowadays is the Entertainment website which exist to amuse and entertain people. I am not providing a link but I am sure you can guess what other “industry” falls in this category?

And last, for today, but by no means least one of the fastest growing types of site must be the Educational website whose primary aim is to provide information about an educational establishment or to present information in an educational manner. With more and more research done online there are sites covering every conceivable topic, but I shuld probably mention Wikipedia, the free online Encyclopedia that anyone can edit, as it is probably the best known.

Hopefully that clarifies things a little? My friend from the above dialogue opted for a blog…

Chris runs the expat blog Almerimar Life covering subjects like expat finance, expat insurance and general advice for expats. He blogs about his life in Spain with his wife Sands, four cats, two Harley Davidsons and (far too often) a glass of red wine. A monthly columnist with the Telegraph Expat he is a regular contributor on a number of local and national papers and radio stations.

America is all abuzz preparing for a very special birthday. This Sunday February 6th marks 100 years since the country’s 40th president Ronald Reagan was born.

Like most non-American natives, I first heard the name of Reagan in 1980, when I was ten, and the news reported that a B-movie actor was running for president. Since I moved to the US, in 2000, I’ve become increasingly amazed at how his legacy has blossomed. No other Western leader continues to inspire so much adoration and vitriol as Reagan. Thatcher’s the closest, but who in Britain is seriously lobbying for her to have a mountain or airport named after her?

This week-end, Reagan may well be bigger than Jesus. At Sunday’s Super Bowl, which unites Americans even more than Christmas, a tribute to Reagan will be played on the massive screen at Cowboys Stadium in Texas. Prior to that, the Reagan Ranch in Santa Barbara is hosting a weekend of centennial events. They kick off on Friday with a keynote speech by none other than Sarah Palin, who boasts that she is a “Reagan conservative.” She hopes the speech will re-ignite her 2012 presidential campaign. Or, in the words of the press release issued by the Young America’s Foundation: “Governor Palin will call for young people to continue the Reagan revolution into the future.”

The Tea party's choice for Reagan's successor?

Former Vice-President Dick Cheney, hoping to regain the love of his party, will close out the festivities with a speech on Saturday.

At the Reagan Library in Simi Valley, meanwhile, the weekend’s festivities include a fighter jet flyover, a 21-gun salute, a Beach Boys concert, a wreath-laying at the Great Communicator’s grave, and the inauguration of the Reagan museum after $15-million of renovations.

The right-wing Fox News is gushing with tributes to Reagan. Host Rush Limbaugh hails him for getting things done when faced by a hostile liberal press: “Ronald Reagan did not have a Rush Limbaugh defending him,” he laments. De facto leader of the Tea Party Glenn Beck hails: “Because of Ronald Reagan I still believe it’s morning in America.”

The National Archives in Washington DC has splashed out on a special exhibition of Reagan memorabilia, including the hand-annotated speech where he described the Soviet Union as “the Evil Empire”. Even President Obama has got in on the act, leaking the fact that he read Lou Cannon’s book, President Reagan: The Role of a Lifetime on his Christmas holidays.

I’ve just returned from the Sundance Film Festival, where one of the most publicized movies being shown was a preview of the documentary called… yup… Reagan. Its aim is to provide the most comprehensive bio-pic ever made of the Gipper. The BBC and HBO have produced it and are showing it on Sunday and Monday, respectively. They brought in top director Eugene Jarecki, whose 2005 film Why We Fight won the Jury Prize at Sundance, and a Peabody Award. His film The Trials of Henry Kissinger won the 2002 Amnesty International Award, so his credentials as an objective documentarian are as strong as you can get.

Film-maker Eugene Jarecki

Jarecki clarified his approach to the film: “Hero, villain, icon, dunce, architect of the modern world – no matter the label – there is little doubt that since his 2004 funeral, America has in many ways become the United States of Reagan…. Who really was Ronald Reagan? How did he come to shape our lives?”

I got a sneak peek at the film in a packed Park city cinema, and throughout the first half was constantly surprised. The film sought to be evenhanded, with interviewees who knew Reagan intimately such as his two sons Michael and Ron Jnr.; former White House chief of staff James Baker; former White House senior advisor Pat Buchanan; and his leading biographers Lou Cannon, Frances Fitzgerald and Edmund Morris.

The film kicked off with a rousing warning by Reagan himself that we should be wary of “false images” of other people and investing them with beliefs that aren’t theirs. That sets the tone for Jarecki’s myth-busting mission to make us see Reagan anew, and to understand, in the words of Ron Reagan Jnr that “my father was both smarter and better than many people on the left think he was, and less the giant that many on the right think he was.”

The film was most illuminating in telling Reagan’s story prior to becoming president. It dwelled on his near-sightedness which did not stop him performing his duties in his first job as a lifeguard, where we are told he pulled an incredible 77 people out of a river.

The short-sighted lifeguard: Reagan, 17, c. 1928

His poor vision did preclude him from serving in World War II, the only regret Reagan ever alludes to. The film documents his acting career, suggesting he was a good but not great actor — “Errol Flynn of the Bs”, in his own words — with a warm talent for light comedy.

Bedtime for Bonzo

I was fascinated to learn that, as a young man, he was a liberal democrat who idolized Roosevelt and fervently supported the New Deal. He was also a union man, becoming President of the Screen Actors Guild. That was until a strike led him to become a militant anti-communist. He even became an FBI informant for the people serving McCarthy – a choice that even Ron Junior admits was “troubling”.

The collapse of his first marriage to actress Jane Wyman revealed him to be the first divorced man ever to have become president.

First wife Jane Wyman, c. 1942

That would lead to his love affair with another actress, Nancy Davis – “she saved my soul”, Reagan cooed — who had contacted him while he was SAG President to get her off one of McCarthy’s black lists. Nancy was one of his only close friends, a solitary situation that his biographer claims continued for the rest of his life. Although allegations that Nancy directed his entire personal and political life are not explored, we do learn that Nancy was in charge of firing his staff, since he felt incapable of doing it himself.

Lovebirds, 1964

From Hollywood, the narrative moves to his stint as a corporate spokesman for cigarettes.

Your friendly neighborhood ciggy seller

That was followed by a six-year gig selling appliances for General Electric, where his corporatist beliefs solidified. The move from flogging products to pitching ideas was a logical one, and vivid footage of his pivotal 1964 speech at the Republican national convention, complete with his brilliant tagline “you and I have a rendez-vous with destiny” shows how perfectly he had transformed himself from a salesman to the charismatic conservative equivalent of John F. Kennedy.

The film starts to lose bite in its chronicling of Reagan’s time as Governor of California, especially in his responses to the student protests against the Vietnam war. It features an amusing speech where Reagan declaims, “How about these people singing ‘make love not war’! They look like they can’t make either! One guy had a haircut like Tarzan, walked like Jane, and smelled like Cheetah.”

What the film doesn’t show is Reagan’s role in the violent repression of those demonstrations. Last year, I assisted my girlfriend, who runs the Kent State Truth Tribunal, in organizing an event to commemorate 40 years since May 4, 1970 when the National Guard opened fire on protesting students, killing four, and injuring nine more. One of the revelations that came out of the days I spent at Kent State was that Reagan had been a leading advocate of violence, adding to an atmosphere of national hysteria that later investigations agreed would contribute to the tragedy: “If it takes a bloodbath,” he said the month before, “then let’s get it over with.”

The National Guard open fire, May 4, 1970

Bloodbath: a Kent State student lies dead

Perhaps to justify Jarecki’s obvious sympathy for Reagan, the filmmaker constantly stresses that his real beliefs were very different to the Palins, Becks, McCains and Huckabees who today claim to be his political heirs. As a case in point, he reports how Governor Reagan granted amnesty to 2.6 million immigrants – which would now be a conservative heresy.

The film moves on to tell of his two failed attempts to secure the Republican nominations, and then into his presidency. Here, Jarecki comes across the problem of having to tell one of the most seminal presidencies in US history in 30 minutes while still convincing his audience that he’s being fair. This is a tough challenge, and one I faced when making a documentary about Condoleezza Rice. How do you tell the truth about a character you have never met, and about whom those who did know him have diametrically opposed views?

Jarecki’s answer is to start with the pre-conceptions of both Reagan’s fans and his foes and to challenge them head-on. To Glenn Beck’s claim that “he believed that government just needed to get out of the way”, Jarecki’s interviewees retort that Reagan actually increased the federal workforce while he was Governor. Then as president, despite campaigning to lower taxes, his administration actually raised taxes in six of its eight years. The roots of today’s federal deficit and debt start firmly with Reagonomics.

Jarecki will infuriate the Christian right by denying that Reagan was a particularly religious man. Glenn Beck recently claimed that “Ronnie and Nancy paid tithing until he was dead”, but nothing in Jarecki’s portrait suggests that Jesus’ teaching was the guiding force in Reagan’s life.

To assuage his conservative viewers, Jarecki is very generous to Reagan in his telling of the Iran-Contra affair, when it emerged that his administration had traded arms to Iran for hostages and cash, and then defied the will of Congress and used those proceeds to fund Nicaraguan insurgents and undermine the Sandinista government.

What did he know?

Jarecki accepts Reagan’s plea that he was unaware that these crimes were taking place. Like his former persona as a short-sighted lifeguard, the nastinesses were all out hidden from him. The underlying suggestion was that Reagan was a unique phenomenon – a politician who always told the truth.

A more egregious omission is any mention of Reagan’s support for the dictatorship in Guatemala that led to the death of some 200,000 indigenous people. That’s explored in the hard-hitting documentary Granito, which also premiered at Sundance. The US-supported genocide remains the subject of speeches and books by Nobel Peace Prize winner Rigoberta Menchύ.

In Jarecki’s ‘Director’s statement’, handed out to me as I left the cinema, he writes:

“To his admirers,[Reagan] is the man who restored America’s pride in himself, the leader who ended the Cold War abroad and ignited an era of unparalleled prosperity at home. Yet his detractors question the dubious legacy of his economic policies, the dangerous exceptionalism of his foreign policy, and, culminating in the Iran-Contra affair, his doctrine of dangerous covert trespasses. A third camp sees an amiable dunce, the smiling figurehead of an executive branch that has exploded beyond any balance of power with the other branches and which far too often represents the interests of a powerful few over those of the many.”

Jarecki’s film is successful in portraying all these three personae, and how different myths have spawned from those images. But where it ultimately fails is in showing what Reagan was like as a human being. Edmund Morris, his official biographer, a Brit, claims that Reagan was not introspective – an observation that two of Condoleezza Rice’s biographers also made to me about her. Morris, who researched him for 14 years, says that “if I asked him personal questions about faith or women, I got answers that sounded like a cool, large cave.”

These intimacies are the real mystery. Did he really fear nothing? What motivated him to seek power? What did he pray for? Why did he stand for a second term, against the advice of his son Ron Jnr, who saw the onset of Alzheimer’s disease as early as 1984? If Nancy really was his only close friend, how did that loneliness affect him? What were his real regrets?

Like the fractured strands of the ailing Reagan’s memory, so the film too ultimately fails to give more than hints of what really made him laugh and cry. The archival footage that Jarecki’s research team has excavated is historically fascinating; the editing and musical scoring are immaculate; and his goal to puncture the pompous pronouncements of those who claim to be carrying forward his torch is achieved. But ultimately Reagan, a man who deeply valued his privacy, slips away from the film-maker’s grasp. And that is an elusiveness likely to generate even more myths about who the real Reagan was.

Grandfather of the Nation

“Reagan” premieres in the US on HBO Monday Feb 7th 9-11pm ET/PT; and in the UK on BBC 4 Sunday February 6th at 9pm GMT.

At a recent dinner while making social chit chat, several of the guests scratched their heads in some bemusement and asked me whether I was a fan of BBC TV’s Mastermind or aspired to becoming a local politician. My crime? Apparently I just asked too many exhausting questions that required local knowledge.

Do you know the height of Majorca's highest peak?

You see in Spain it is considered completely normal to quiz fellow guests on their home town, local population and economy, educational policy, town hall politics, geographical data and history of the locale, and anything else that pops into one’s head. To my shame the first time I was asked at an all Spanish dinner party about Leeds I failed at the first post. ‘But you were a student there, right?’ said one chirpy Spanish guest. ‘You must know the names of Yorkshire’s highest peaks?’ (Pen-y-Ghent, Whernside and Ingleborough, I discovered too late).… Read more

A decade ago newspapers were full of the sorry tale of tennis player Boris Becker issued with a fine from his local council in Majorca for flouting building regulations. Worse than that, he was forced to demolish part of an extension that he had apparently built in the belief that all paperwork was in order. It wasn’t.

Now MP Mark Field has been charged with ignoring planning laws in his local mountain town of Alaro in Majorca and is being threatened with the bulldozers. He is accused of having illegally built a 400 square foot annexe on to his villa and his lawyers are working around the clock to resolve the matter. The word “resolve” is an interesting euphemism in Majorca for paying a hefty fine and no doubt if Mark Field is lucky his lawyers might work their magic.

Listening to BBC news programmes in Shanghai, I’m always struck by the words people in authority use. When did perpetrators become “vulnerable” and the consequence of a crime require “support”? The September 20 edition of Woman’s Hour featured the story of a girl who was gang-raped in a British town centre aged 13, by men hanging out in high streets who had groomed her. Her abuse carried on for months. Her father told how the inability of the police to secure a prosecution or protect the child, eventually forced them to leave the country. But not before they changed the child’s school and received threats that she would be kidnapped and their home burnt down. The unidentified man said, “Quite simply we decided to leave the country. It was the only option for us as parents.”

Cue Jim Gamble, chief executive of the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Unit. Asked what the police know about the types of gangs that prey on young girls, he said: “These young men generally identify in the margins of their community, those young people who are vulnerable.” No! They are not vulnerable. They are aggressors. Missing out on the benefits others enjoy does not make someone turn bad. Not everyone from a bad family goes on to rape under-age girls. If Hitler had been abused as a child, would it make him “vulnerable” and excuse the six million Jews he killed?

“We need to remain victim-focused”, mumbled Gamble. No, you need to focus on criminals and catch them! People poke fun at the English-language press here because papers sometimes carry headlines such as, “Deadbeat busted” but at least, in China, people have the guts to call a spade a spade. The UK authorities are so concerned about offending, even unnamed criminals, that they have lost sight of the basic distinctions between good and bad.

He went on, “The best way for us to begin better supporting young people in this particular type of crime is about educating and empowering them.” No, no, no. You catch the criminals and leave the support part to her family. The police are supposed to protect, not support people.

It was not revealed which country the family featured on Woman’s Hour moved to, but I hope they now feel safe, as we expats are lucky to feel in Shanghai. It’s a basic right that seems increasingly harder to come by in the UK.

Even if there is none of the craziness of the Olympic crowds, people generally feel this will reignite the excitement of the previous month: this city is just not ready to go cold turkey from hardcore partying. Earlier this week in Whistler you could feel the buzz – all overlooked by the Inukshuk statue, the First Nations’ symbol of “welcome” – as the torch was taken down the mountain by a Paralympian skier. With CTV in Canada covering the Games live – and the BBC offering recorded highlights (provoking annoyance on the Spinal Injuries Scotland website, look out for Britain’s sit-skier Sean… Read more